Solar Myths . . . again

Oklahoma recently made the news with stories like this.   Most of the left leaning news sources have picked up the story and misrepresented the facts around the law, technology, and science.  I have covered the science behind solar panels in detail in this post.    Do we have a massive corporate conspiracy by oil companies that has been hidden from the public for years and would involve both political parties?      The short answer is no.

Solar panels sound good on a bumper sticker but the technology just isn't there.  Everyone always talks about Germany, but their solar panels were installed on over 20 billion Euros of subsidies netting about 3% of their power needs.

There's no way to store the extra power so individual homes aren't allowed to feed power back to the grid. The perfect solar panel could theoretically convert about 33% of the sun's energy into power. Our best panels do about 18% but that requires perfect angels, clear skies, and being geographically located on the equator. Germany has shut down most of their conventional power plants which means they have to buy their power from their neighbors when there isn't enough sun to fill the demand. This is especially true in the winter when they sun is hidden by clouds for months. This has made their average electric bill the second highest in the EU. They have restarted some of their old plants that use oil to fill the gaps. I guess modern people hate brown outs.

The best case would be to build the solar power plants in the desert where the sun isn't interrupted by weather and transmission lines to carry the power to the consumer. This would exclude the northern United States since the available solar energy decreases as you move north.  You would still have to keep existing plants running because you can't just throw a switch and instantly get power from a conventional power plant when the demand exceeds the available supply. So you would have to build twice the infrastructure and still produce the same amount of green house gases while the consumer pays for it all.

The bottom line is "alternative" energy sources aren't economically feasible due to technology constraints. This is mainly due to the lack of industrial batteries.  Germany is a beacon of failure but no one is willing to research it. Simply throwing money at it makes people feel good but in the end we are still digging the hole at the same speed and just poorer.

In the past, Oklahoma has been like most states paying subsidies (tax breaks) to people who install alternative energy sources. Where this ties into the news story is that if a large number of individuals are feeding power back to grid then they have to make infrastructure changes to handle it because our power system wasn't designed that way.   When more power is generated than used, the power has to be dumped because it can't be stored. (It's actually cheaper to just not feed the power to the grid) The utility companies can't pay for this extra cost out of pocket and they are limited on what they can charge consumers. (The power utilities are regulated in Oklahoma)  This leaves a few possibilities which are to charge everyone more for the electric or more government subsidies.   Either way, everyone pays the extra cost for a few people to feel good about them self. The most viable option is to tax those causing the problem.

The only way we will get off the oil dependency is to pour money into science and R&D.  Unfortunately, science has been subject to budget cuts for years.    In fact, every dollar wasted on installing "alternative" energy source would be better served to be spend on science.    We must develop an economical feasible technology to replace oil.   

Right now, the most promising science to help with global warming is to remove the CO2 from the air by chemical reactions or to collect it from the exhaust of conventional power plants.   So it's possible that solar will never replace oil.